This performance of Barrymore holds for me the first and last requisite of organized conception in art--poise, clarity, and perfect suggestibility. Its intellectual soundness rules the emotional extravagance, giving form to what--for lack of form--so often perishes under an excess of energy, which the ignorant actor substitutes for the plastic element in all art. It has the attitude, this performance, almost of diffidence to one's subject-matter, except as the intellect judges clearly and coolly. Thus, in the sense of esthetic reality, are all aspects clarified and made real. From the outward inward, or from the inward outward, surface to depth or depth to surface--it is difficult to say which is the precise method of approach. John Barrymore has mastered the evasive subtlety therein, which makes him one of our greatest artists. The future will surely wait for his riper contributions, and we may think of him as one of our foremost artists, among the few, "one of a small band," as the great novelist once said of the great poet. PART THREE LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS Divine Tuesday! I had wondered if those remarkable evenings of conversation in the rue de Rome with Mallarme as host, and Henri de Regnier as guest, among many others, had been the inspiration of the evenings at the Closerie de Lilas, where I so often sat of an evening, watching the numbers of esthetes gather, filling the entire cafe, rain or shine, waiting unquestionably, for it pervaded the air always, the feeling of suspense, of a dinner without host, of a wedding without bridegroom, in any event waiting for the real genius of the evening, le grand maitre prince de poetes, Paul Fort. The interesting book of Amy Lowell's, "Six French Poets," recalls these Tuesday evenings vividly to my mind, and a number of episodes in connection with the idea of poetry in Paris. Poetry an event? A rather remarkable notion it would seem, and yet this was always so, it was a constituent of the day's passing, there was never a part of the day in this arrondissement, when you would not find here, there, everywhere, from the Boul-Mich up, down Montparnasse to Lavenue's, and back to the Closerie, groups of a few or of many, obviously the artist or poet type, sometimes very nattily dressed, often the reverse, but you found them talking upon one theme, art, meaning either poetry or painting, cubistes, futuristes, orphistes and doubtless every "iste" in poetry from the symboliste period up to the "unanimistes" of the present time, or the then present time nearly two years before the war. It was a bit novel, even for a sensitive American, sitting there, realizing that it was all in the name of art, and for the heralding of genius--a kind of sublimated recruiting meeting for the enlistment in the army of expression of personality, or for the saving of the soul of poetry.